The grounds of Wilson Grammar School, a segregated institution in La Habra until 1950, were overrun by weeds. COURTESY ENRIQUE ZUNIGA

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A boy and a girl look over Campo Colorado, one of three La Habra camps that were home to Mexican immigrant and Mexican-American farmhands throughout the first half of the 20th century. COURTESY ENRIQUE ZUNIGA

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A 1940s picture of Antonia and Secundino Mejia with their three sons at their Barrio Alta Vista in La Habra. During that time the roads were dirt and the running water was cold. Five generations of the Mejia family have lived in La Habra. Some are still residents. CINDY YAMANAKA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Ray Molina, right, now 74, as a kid in Campo Colorado with his grandfather Julio Molina and his sisters Mary-Lou, left, and Linda, circa 1940. COURTESY OF RAY MOLINA

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Connie and Frank Mejia recall their teenage dates when she would have to crawl throughout the window of his car. The door didn't open. He joked that when it happened he knew she was the girl for him. Connie grew up in Whittier. Frank was raised three doors down when the area was referred to as Barrio Alta Vista. CINDY YAMANAKA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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When the Wilson Grammar School closed in 1950, it ended an era of school segregation in La Habra. The stories of the treatment of the students with Mexican ethnicity by their white teachers are harsh and sometimes cruel.

As a way to memorialize the struggles that these students went through, Rosie’s Garage, the iconic tutoring center founded by Mayor Rose Espinoza, is hosting its second annual fundraiser Oct. 5 in honor of the Wilson alumni. The event is part fundraiser for Rosie’s, part school reunion and part conversation on the era of segregation.

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The roads were dirt. When kids shuffled by on their way to school, dust kicked up and caked the air.

There was running water, but no hot water.

The houses were more like sheds. Often, large families lived in one-bedroom huts or barracks.

The men jumped in beater trucks in the morning and drove off to pick oranges or walnuts or any other crop that covered much of rural La Habra. The kids, who on weekends scooped up fruit from the ground while the adults worked among the treetops, were affectionately called ratas, Spanish for “rats.”

This is a snapshot of life in “the camps,” three barrios – Campo Colorado, Campo Corona and Barrio Alta Vista – home to Mexican American and Mexican immigrant farmhands from 1916 until the 1960s. The families that lived there struggled. At times they faced discrimination and segregation. Many of the white residents of La Habra proper thought the camps, south of the railroad tracks, were dangerous.

Still, the camps were vibrant, communal neighborhoods, according to many elderly La Habra residents who grew up in them.

“When I look back on life there, it was fun,” said Carmen Gaeta Chytraus, 70, who lived in Campo Colorado in the late 1940s and early 1950s. “We didn't miss what we never had.”

‘IT WAS A STRUGGLE'

The camps sprang up in 1916 when the La Habra Citrus Association brought the Mexican fruit pickers to town to help work the fields.

Most of the men would pick fruit in the unforgiving Southern California sun. Others worked in the packing plants. The children, when not in school, tried to scrounge money any way they could. The money went to their folks for rent or food.

“On Saturday, the whole barrio was empty,” said Enrique Zuniga, 74, who grew up in Campo Colorado, the smallest camp with 70 homes. “Everyone went to work. We'd get into the same trucks as our fathers and go to the fields, or we'd caddie for tips at the Hacienda Golf Club.”

There was no indoor plumbing or sewers. Outhouses and community showers dotted the neighborhoods. The barrios created makeshift stores, run out of houses, to provide milk and other goods, because many shops in La Habra refused to serve Mexicans.

Families used curtains to divide living rooms, creating second sleeping areas. When the association brought in barracks in 1947 to Campo Colorado to alleviate overcrowding, the families who moved there got a measure of legroom.

“When we lived in House 59, I slept under a bed with another brother,” said Zuniga, who in 1947 moved, along with the other 12 people in his family, to House 69, an army barracks. “When we moved to the barracks, it was the first time I slept on a bed.”

There were inconveniences. School buses, for example, did not pick up students living in the barrios, Chytraus said. For years, Zuniga said, the postmaster would not send mail carriers there.

“I had fun as a kid,” Chytraus said. “But when I look back, it was a struggle.”

ISOLATION AND SEGREGATION

In an era that predated the Civil Rights Act, the March on Washington and the Chicano movement, leaving the camps for any reason carried with it an inherent risk.

“When someone moved from the barrio to (other parts of) La Habra, we were worried they would be beat up or killed,” said Cruz Reynoso, 82, who lived in Alta Vista and ultimately became the first Hispanic associate judge on the California Supreme Court. “A friend of mine came back from World War II and bought a house in La Habra. His neighbors on both sides offered to buy it for twice what he paid. So we were aware of the separateness.”

Reynoso moved with his family to Barrio Alta Vista when he was 7. When his family arrived in that La Habra camp in the summer of 1938, school was fast approaching. Reynoso and his older brothers, all of whom spoke English, went to find a school.

Reynoso says he saw Lincoln School, a tall brick building with a lawn of lush grass and trees. He went to the school office to get more information.

“We were told we had to go to Wilson to learn English,” he said. “But we were already bilingual. I also noticed that some of the Anglos who lived closer to Wilson were being bused to Lincoln.”

Wilson Grammar School was multiple wooden, bungalow-like buildings. The grounds were mostly dirt, except where weeds had taken hold. The students were all of Mexican ethnicity. They were not allowed to speak anything but English.

“I was whipped with a hose by a teacher once for speaking Spanish,” said Ray Molina, 74, who was born in Campo Colorado and still lives on the same property his father bought on Electric Avenue.

As the kids got older, they moved on from Wilson (which closed in 1950) and attended integrated Washington School and then La Habra High School. Again, the former La Habra pupils said, no Spanish was allowed at those two schools. The rules and punishments, they also said, were harsher for them than their white peers.

On occasion, the parents of white friends prohibited them from hanging out. When Our Lady of Guadalupe was on Fourth Street, below the tracks, it was almost entirely Mexican. After the church burned down and was rebuilt at its current location on La Habra Boulevard, more white people began attending Mass. The priests, according to Zuniga, started doing sermons in English only.

“Even though we're Americans,” Zuniga said, “we sometimes felt that we were in somebody else's country.”

THE BARRIO IS FAMILY

But despite the hardships, the camps were anything but bleak.

Sitting in their homes, with black-and-white photographs sprawled on their tables, the former residents of the camp spoke of yearly fiestas at Los Arbolitos, a local gathering spot covered with trees; having rock fights after school; listening to the radio; flocking to the house of the one family that had a television; and how the barrios grew to become one family.

“Everybody knew each other,” Molina said. “When somebody died, the whole barrio would show up to the wake. We got along, because we didn't have anything.”

The camps, geographically, were small compared with the rest of La Habra. But because everyone who lived there also worked together and helped watch one another's children, the three barrios, in a way, became one village.

Frank Mejia, 87, has lived in the same house in what was once Alta Vista since 1948.

“People think it's awful to live in a place like that,” he said. “But we grew up as family.”

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